Boy Woodburn Part 66

As they pa.s.sed through the north gate of the Park, Ginger slowed down to a walk.

"If I've time it right," he said, "she should be doin' her gallop while we walks along the ridge. Don't show too keen, sir."

A long sallow man sitting on the roadside at the edge of the wood eyed them.

The driver nudged his companion.

"One of 'em," he said. "Ikey's Own. Know by the cut of 'em."

"Many about?" asked Silver.

"Been all over us since Christmas," answered the other. "Cargo of 'em landed at Liverpool Bank 'oliday. All sorts. All chose for the job. Stop at nothin'. If they suspicion you they move you on or put you out. They watch her same as if she was the Queen of England. And I don't wonder.

n.o.body knows the millions she'll carry."

When they were well past the man at the roadside he whistled. There came an answering call from the wood in front.

As they emerged on to the open Downs, Ginger pulled up short.

"They've done us, sir," he said shortly.

A hundred yards ahead of them a sheeted chestnut was coming toward them on the gra.s.s alongside the road.

Jim Silver had only seen the Waler mare once--on the occasion of her famous victory and defeat at Aintree the previous year; but once seen Moca.s.sin was never forgotten.

She came along at that swift, pattering walk of hers, her nose in the air, and ears twitching.

"Always the same," whispered Ginger. "In a terrible hurry to get there."

He had the true Putnam feeling about Jaggers; but that pa.s.sion of devotion for the mare, which had inspired the English-speaking race for the past year, had not left him untouched. Jim Silver felt the little prosaic man thrilling at his side, and thrilled in his turn. He felt as he had felt when as a Lower Boy at Eton the Captain of the Boats had spoken to him--a swimming in the eyes, a br.i.m.m.i.n.g of the heart, a gulping at the throat.

"Is that Moca.s.sin?" he called to the lad riding the mare.

"That's the Queen o' Kentucky, sir," replied the other c.o.c.kily. "Never was beaten, and never will be--given fair play."

"Done your gallop?"

"Half an hour since."

Ginger drove on discreetly.

On a knoll, three hundred yards away, four men were standing.

"There they are!" said Ginger. "Pretty, ain't they?--specially Chukkers.

I don't know who that fat feller is along of 'em."

But Silver knew very well.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

The Queen of Kentucky

The little group on the knoll came off the gra.s.s on to the road, close in talk.

Jaggers was tall and attenuated. He had the look of a self-righteous ascetic, and dressed with puritanical austerity. No smile ever irradiated his gaunt face and remorseless eyes. His forehead was unusually high and white; his manners high, too; and if his morals were not white, his cravat, that was like a parson's, more than made up for the defect. It was not surprising then that among the fraternity he was known as His Reverence, because his bearing gave the impression of a Nonconformist Minister about to conduct a teetotal campaign.

Chukkers, who was wearing the familiar jodhpores which he always affected, was quite a different type. A big man for a jockey, he rarely rode under eleven stone, though he carried never an ounce of flesh.

Sporting journalists were in the habit of referring to him as a Samson in the saddle, so large of bone and square of build was he. His success, indeed, was largely due to his extraordinary strength. It was said that once in a moment of temper he had crushed a horse's ribs in, while it was an undeniable fact that he could make a horse squeal by the pressure of his legs.

He was clearly a Mongol, some said a Chinaman by origin; and certainly his great bowed s.h.i.+ns, his dirty complexion, his high cheek-bones, and that impa.s.sive Oriental face of his, gave authority to the legend. When you met him you marked at once that his eyes were reluctant to catch yours; and when they did you saw two little gashes opening on sullen-twinkling muddy waters.

The worst of us have our redeeming features. And Chukkers with all his crude defects possessed at least one outstanding virtue--faithfulness--to the man who had made him. Ikey had brought him as a lad into the country where he had made his name; Ikey had given him his chance; to Ikey for twenty-five years now he had stuck with unswerving devotion, in spite of temptation manifold, often-repeated, and aggravated. The relations between the two men were the subject of much gossip. They never talked of each other; and though often together, very rarely spoke. Chukkers was never known to express admiration or affection or even respect for his master. But the bond between them was intimate and profound. It was notorious that the jockey would throw over the Heir to the Throne himself at the last moment to ride for the little Levantine. And of late years it had been increasingly rare for him to sport any but the star-spangled jacket.

Ikey Aaronsohnn, the third of the famous Three, walked between the other two, as befitted the brain and purse of the concern. He was a typical Levantine, Semitic, even Simian, small-featured, and dark. In his youth he must have been pretty, and there was still a certain charm about him.

He had qualities, inherent and super-imposed, entirely lacking to his two colleagues. A man of education and some natural refinement, he had a delicious sense of humour which helped him to an enjoyment of life and such a genial appreciation of his own malpractices and those of others as to make him the best of company and far the most popular of the Three J's.

If Chukkers was little more than an animal-riding animal, and Jaggers an artistic fraud, Ikey was a rascal of a highly differentiated and engaging type. A man of admirable tenacity he had clung for twenty-five years to the ideal which Chukkers's discovery of Moca.s.sin two years since had brought within his grasp.

The disqualification of the mare at Liverpool last year after the great race had served only to whet his appet.i.te and kindle his faith.

A quarter of a century before he had set himself to find the horse that would beat the English thoroughbred at Aintree. And in Moca.s.sin he had at last achieved his aim.

If a cloud of romance hung about the mare, veiling in part her past, some points at least stood out clear.

It was known that her dam was a Virginian mare of the stately kind which of late years has filled the eye in the sale-ring at Newmarket and held its own between the flags. And piquancy was added by the fact, recorded in the Kentucky stud-book, that the dam traced her origin direct to Iroquois who in the Derby of 1881 had lowered the English colours to the dust.

Again there was no doubt that the mare had been born in a yellow-pine shack in the c.u.mberlands, on an old homestead--made familiar to millions in both continents by the picture papers--known as Blue Mounds, and owned by a Quaker farmer who was himself the great-grandson of a pioneer Friend, who in the last years of the eighteenth century had crossed the mountains with his family and flocks, like Abraham of old, and had won for himself this clearing from the primeval forest, driving farther west its ancient denizens.

So much, not even the arrogant English dared to dispute.

But the rest was mystery. It was said that Jaggers himself did not know who was Moca.s.sin's sire; and that Ikey and Chukkers, the only two who did, were so close that they never let on even to each other. True the English, with characteristic bluff, when they discovered that they had found their mistress in the mare, took it for granted that her sire was an imported English horse and even named him. But Ikey and Chukkers both denied the importation with emphasis.

Then there were those who traced her origin to a horse from the Bombay Arab stables. These swore they could detect the Prophet's Thumb on the mare's auburn neck. The Waler School had many backers; and there were even a few cranks who suggested for the place of honour a curly-eared Kathiawar horse. But the All-American School, dominant in the States and Southern Republic, maintained with truculence that a Spanish stallion from the Pampas was the only sire for G.o.d Almighty's Mustang. The wild horse theory, as it was called, appealed to popular sentiment, however remote from the fact, and helped to build the legend of the mare. And in support of the theory, it must be said that Moca.s.sin, in spite of her lovableness, had in her more of the jaguar than of the domestic cat, grown indolent, selfish, and fat through centuries of security and sleep.

"Wild as the wildman and sweet as the briar-rose," was the saying they had about her in the homestead where she was bred.

Ikey got into his car and rolled away through the dust toward Brighton.

The other three men strolled back to the yard.

"Bar accidents, there's only one you've got to fear," said Joses.